Interactive report charts with Arnica WebReport

Powerful data processing and presentation features in Arnica WebReportare complemented by its charting capabilities, which allow using both WebReport's own embedded chart engine and various third-party charting components and services, e.g.: cloud-based Google Charts service, FusionCharts, etc. WebReport provides flexible chart design and integration environment, it also has an easy-to-use chart generation wizard, which helps implement fully integrated charts in minutes.

This article is a quick walk-through on how to create a chart, integrated with report data, using WebReport's chart generation wizard.

As an example, we will create an area chart of sales dynamics by month using data from an existing report:

To start the process, a new chart is created from the chart design environment:

From the properties page of a new chart, select Generate Chart link to access chart wizard:

The first step of the chart wizard is to select chart technology to be used. In this example, we will choose Adobe Flash-based chart, using Arnica WebReport charting engine:

Next, select an appropriate chart type for the anticipated presentation, for example, area chart:

With the column selection tool on the next page of the chart wizard, pick columns for the X axis and Y axis of the chart, and click on the Finish button to accept accumulated chart properties.

Finally use Preview Chart link from the chart design environment to see how the chart will be displayed at run-time to end users:

The result looks like this:

From this point, chart becomes part of the report and may be configured to show in report header, footer, or other part of the report output page: either side-by-side with tabular data, displayed on a standalone page, or brought up by click on the Charts icon on the report toolbar: